Free Roosevelt by James MacGregor Burns Page B

group, remembering Untermeyer’s antitrust and anti-Morgan activities, helped destroy his chances. Murphy did not miss his opportunity. He charged that the Insurgents were but a front for the reactionary Stetson group.
    By late March the struggle had become a bitter war of nerves. Roosevelt and Terry were losing control of their small group; “wecame near going on the rocks several times,” Roosevelt said later. Tammany was still uneasy about a possible deal between Republicans and Insurgents. At this point Murphy staged an elaborate maneuver. He suggested a compromise candidate in Justice Victor J. Dowling. Knowing that the Insurgent tail could not wag the Democratic dog, Roosevelt and his group agreed. But a day later, as the Insurgents met just before going to the caucus they had boycotted so long, word came that Dowling had refused the nomination and Murphy had substituted the name of Justice James A. O’Gorman, formerly Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall.
    Could the Insurgents swallow O’Gorman? Could they afford not to? O’Gorman, despite his Tammany connections, had shown independence from the machine. Moreover, he was ex-president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and beloved by the Irish. Some of the Insurgents had previously said they would accept O’Gorman. Two of the group left immediately to enter the caucus and vote for O’Gorman. The rest, badly divided, debated the matter for hours during that afternoon. Finally a majority, with Roosevelt and a few others still opposed, decided to go along with O’Gorman, after Smith and Wagner promised that there would be no reprisals. Roosevelt’s little band was deserting him.
    The end was inglorious. Hoots, groans, and hisses greeted the Insurgents as they filed into the chamber for the final vote. They had done their duty as they saw it, Roosevelt said lamely. “We are Democrats—not irregulars, but regulars.” The press felt that the Insurgents had been outgeneraled. Roosevelt maintained that the Insurgents had won, but a defensive note crept into his letters to his constituents. And he was wary about future Insurgent strategy. “I believe it will be a mistake for us to try to get all of the former Insurgents together again,” he wrote to a friend, “but there are ten or twelve of us who can form a pretty good nucleus to work.”
    Roosevelt could mark up some gains from the struggle. He had won national attention, he had strengthened his position in his district, and Progressives probably remembered his lengthy fight against Tammany long after they forgot the anticlimactic ending. Perhaps more important in the long run, the young politician had been given a telling education in the tactics of pressure and intrigue.
    But he had suffered losses too. Midway in the struggle Sumner Gerard had urged him toward moderation. “If you go too far, needlessly, you run the danger of impairing your future political effectiveness.” Roosevelt knew what Gerard meant by his “future political effectiveness.” An aroused Tammany would spike any statewide ambitions the senator might have. But Roosevelt was in no mood to compromise. When a constituent warned him of the Tiger’slong memory, Roosevelt said, “No, right is right, no matter who it hurts.”
    He was not willing to let the issue die. Months after the Sheehan fight he told a Buffalo audience that Murphy “and his kind” must be destroyed, that the “beasts of prey have begun to fall.” Tammany lashed back. The “silly conceits of a political prig,” said a Murphy lieutenant. The party should not tolerate these fops and cads, these political accidents who “come as near being political leaders as a green pea does a circus tent.” The Tammany man compared Roosevelt’s education and background with his own leadership, which, he said, depended on “human sympathy, human interest, and human ties among those with whom I was born and bred.…”
    The struggle between the high-minded patrician and the earthy,